Christine Piper has been shortlisted for her debut novel After Darkness.
Photograph: Timothy Lee/Allen and Unwin

A debut novelist is among the five authors shortlisted for Australia’s most prestigious literary prize, the Miles Franklin award.

In her first book, After Darkness – which won the Vogel literary prize in 2014 – Australian-Japanese author Christine Piper tells the story of a Japanese doctor questioning his identity after he is arrested and interned in a South Australian camp during the second world war.

Also making the shortlist are Joan London and Sofie Laguna, both also nominated for the 2015 Stella prize, which was originally conceived as a counterpoint to the Miles Franklin, an award historically dominated by male winners.

London’s book, The Golden Age, also set in the mid-20th century, is a love story between two polio patients in a 1959 Perth hospital – Australian Elsa Briggs and Hungarian refugee Frank Gold.

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Talking about her characters, London told Guardian Australia: “These children … belong to an era of great change in Australia, a time of reclaiming and forging our own identity, of the influence of waves of immigration from Europe and Asia, of breaking away from the English colonial model.”

Family relationships and class divisions are themes that feature prominently in all the shortlisted works. The Eye of the Sheep by Laguna is told from the point of view of a young boy, Jimmy, who struggles with learning difficulties.

Laguna said: “I relished the idea of writing a sustained narrative in the voice of this charged, vulnerable, precious little boy ... I knew the power he held would be in the way he saw the world; though Jimmy’s understanding would be naive, it would also be empathetic, often profound, intuitive and poetic.”

In Golden Boys, author Sonya Hartnett also writes from a child’s perspective – a boy’s view of his father after they move to a working-class suburb of Melbourne. Harnett is a former winner of the Guardian’s children’s fiction prize for her 2002 book, Thursday’s Child.

The last of the shortlisted works, Tree Palace by Craig Sherborne, the only male author on the 2015 shortlist, explores human relationships within a poor dysfunctional family as they try to survive in rural Victoria through stealing and exploiting welfare.

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Speaking on behalf of the judges, the State Library of NSW Mitchell librarian, Richard Neville, said: “The 2015 Miles Franklin shortlist presents a powerful group of Australian novels with a rich cast of unforgettable characters, and themes ranging from childhood gangs and domestic violence to itinerant thieves, wartime internment and the post-war polio epidemic.”

The Miles Franklin award, first presented in 1957, was created following the bequest of Stella “Miles” Franklin to celebrate Australian culture and creativity. The prize rewards a novel that contributes to Australian literature and represents Australian life.

The 2014 prize was picked up by Evie Wyld for her novel All the Birds, Singing. This year’s winner will be announced in Victoria on 23 June and will receive $60,000 prize money. The shortlisted authors will each take home $5,000.